Bowery Dreams

A new home for the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

The tower contrasts dramatically with its setting. Photograph by Robert Polidori.

In the past few decades, American museums have discovered an easy way to get themselves noticed: put up a building by an international architect who hasn’t built much in this country before. Too often, though, these exciting débuts go nowhere. Mario Botta’s San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Josef Paul Kleihues’s Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, and James Stirling’s Sackler Museum, in Cambridge, all failed to earn their creators any more American museum commissions.

In 2002, when the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York began to plan for a new building on the Bowery, east of its previous location, in SoHo, it decided to limit the search to younger architects who had not built anything in New York. “We thought we should be consistent with our mission of supporting new art,” Lisa Phillips, the director, told me. The search led the museum to SANAA, a twelve-year-old firm in Tokyo, whose principals, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, are known for buildings of almost diaphanous lightness. When the museum hired them, Sejima and Nishizawa had just one American commission, the Glass Pavilion, at the Toledo Museum of Art, an eye-catching structure of curving glass walls, which opened last year. Their best-known work includes a low-slung circular art gallery with no clear front or back, in Kanazawa, Japan, and a design school in Essen, Germany, that is a concrete cube a hundred feet high, punctuated, seemingly at random, with windows of assorted sizes.

SANAA’s refined style might seem odd on the Bowery, one of the grittiest streets in New York. The site, a former parking lot at the intersection with Prince Street, was framed by blocks of restaurant-supply stores, whose owners seemed to be the only property holders on the Lower East Side who showed no interest in selling out to condominium developers. But after two decades in SoHo the New Museum had seen both the upside and the downside of gentrification. Marcia Tucker established the museum in 1977—the day after she was fired from the Whitney for curating shows that it found too controversial—in order to focus on cutting-edge art. Yet as the museum grew larger it drifted from its radical beginnings, just as the Museum of Modern Art had done two generations before. The decision to move to the Bowery was perhaps a clever way of assuring its supporters that its agenda remains radical.

But things have changed since the New Museum purchased the lot, in 2002. There is now a Whole Foods nearby, several luxury condominiums within view of the museum’s front door, and expensive shops, including a Ralph Lauren, amid the former tenements around the corner. The area hovers between a grungy past and an overpriced future. The New Museum may have left SoHo, but it is powerless to prevent SoHo from following it to the Bowery.

Sejima and Nishizawa have designed a building that is just right for this moment of the Bowery’s existence. It is a pile of six boxes, stacked unevenly, like a child’s blocks. Sometimes the blocks mount up in a pattern of setbacks like that of a traditional New York building; sometimes they jut out over open space in a way that suggests the architects had something more radical in mind. The building is original, but doesn’t strain to reinvent the idea of a museum. Sejima and Nishizawa have a way of combining intensity with understatement.

What makes the museum unlike any other building in New York is its surface—corrugated-aluminum panels painted silvery gray, with an aluminum mesh suspended an inch and a half in front of them. The mesh is a standard industrial material but it gives the building the lightness of glass and the porosity of fabric. The visual signals this building sends—it is at once crisp and pliable, solid and permeable—seem deliberately ambiguous. When you look from a block or so away, the façade seems semitransparent—less like a wall than a scrim.

The depth and shadow and texture of the façade can be almost magical in the changing light. When you get near, however, the mystery is lost. You see that Sejima and Nishizawa have performed their magic with routine elements, and when you stand right in front of the building its metal mesh looks harsh, even abrasive. Once the museum opens, next month, the effect may be more welcoming: the ground floor is sheathed entirely in glass, and a gallery and bookstore will be visible from the street. At the moment, the museum is enticing from afar but off-putting up close.

Things get good again when you go through the door. SANAA’s ability to design places that look simple but actually have a lot going on has resulted in galleries that combine the clear, flexible quality of loft spaces with some shrewd architectural intervention. The second, third, and fourth floors have large, white-walled exhibition spaces, with ceiling heights of as much as twenty-four feet. The galleries, illuminated in part by natural light (through skylights), have some of the virtues of neutrality but are more inviting than plain white boxes. The main gallery spaces are almost, but not precisely, rectangular. One wall is angled just a bit, reflecting the diagonal of the Bowery, but the shift is so subtle that you don’t notice it until you look up and see that the front wall is not quite parallel to the steel beams that run across the ceiling. This gives the room a slight frisson, without making it any less flexible or hospitable to art. The floors are all finished in a richly toned polished concrete that has been poured without the usual expansion joints, allowing it to develop small cracks as it sets. It looks both ancient and modern, and has a stunning resonance against the stark walls. (“It almost looks like an Anselm Kiefer,” Lisa Phillips said as we walked through, and she was exaggerating only slightly.)

There are more flourishes once you get away from the main exhibition area: aluminum-lined elevators painted a kind of electric chartreuse; shelves that snake through the lobby in a sensuous curve, the one counterpoint to the building’s straight lines. The most exciting space in the building is only four feet wide and some fifty feet high, and is tucked behind the elevators: it contains a stairway connecting the third- and fourth-floor galleries. I have never been anywhere at once so eerily narrow and so gloriously monumental. The stair hall, if you can call it that, has a large window with a view to the north, and a landing that opens onto a tiny exhibit area, barely more than a balcony.

In keeping their architectural tricks away from most of the art, Sejima and Nishizawa establish a certain kinship with the original building of the Museum of Modern Art, by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone. When that building burst onto West Fifty-third Street, in 1939, you could create excitement simply by sticking a modern building into a row of brownstones. The New Museum, similarly, derives its drama from the way it breaks with its surroundings. The original Modern lost much of its architectural power from the nineteen-fifties onward, as the brownstones gave way to a series of additions extending the museum up and down the block, and modernism became the new architecture lingua franca. Right now, the New Museum looks, as the Modern once did, like a thunderbolt from another world, but, as the spread of condos and boutique hotels across the Lower East Side continues, it is at risk of becoming a victim of its own success. ♦

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